ELISABETH MOSS in The Children’s Hour

Elisabeth Moss in The Children's Hour

As the world goes Mad Men mad, Elisabeth Moss is to make her West End debut

AMC’s 60’s-set drama Mad Men has proved nothing short of a TV phenomenon. And at its heart is the compelling relationship between ad man Don Draper and his protegee Peggy Olson.

Peggy is played by Elisabeth Moss, who will make her London theatre debut next year alongside Keira Knightley in a starry revival of Lillian Hellman’s controversial classic The Children’s Hour.

Lillian Hellman’s 1934 play The Children’s Hour, will see Moss and Knightley play two schoolmistresses who run a girl’s boarding school in the 1930s. When a disgruntled student accuses the teachers of having a lesbian affair, a series of dramatic events unfold that destroys both their lives.

Elisabeth Moss, 28, is no stranger to theatre having appeared in the 2008 Broadway revival of David Mamet’s Speed The Plow. However, like Knightley, it is for her movie and TV work that she is best known. She played President Bartlett’s daughter in The West Wing, and won plaudits in 2003 for her lead role in Virgin about a young girl who believes that she is carrying the child of God. She has also been nominated twice for Emmy awards for her role as Peggy in Mad Men.

The last London production of The Children’s Hour was at the National Theatre in 1994 starring Clare Higgins and Harriet Walter. Movie director William Wyler produced two films based on the play, the first in 1936 which had to adapt the story into a heterosexual love triangle, and again in 1961 starring Audrey Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine and James Garner.

The Children’s Hour will open at the end of January in the West End, produced by Sonia Friedman and Scott Landis and directed by ex-Royal Court artistic director Ian Rickson (Jerusalem).

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